Oatcakes - Grandma Ross

While on vacation in Toronto, Allana and I visited with my my Mom's cousin Kathy and her family (although she's my cousin too) who welcomed me into her family when I first moved there and helped so much with my transition from the wilderness setting of my home town to life in a big city, I don't think I realized or appreciated how valuable that generousity was to me at the time.  We spent our time catching up on all the changes in life and reminiscing about family, and a bit related to my blog memories of my Grandma Ross' baking.  As a result I'm feeling Grandma's spirit is a bit closer right now, so to make her feel welcome to hang around for a bit I thought I'd make some oatcakes.
 
I never made oatcakes with Grandma, I don't really even remember her making them, I just remember sometimes there were warm oatcakes for lunch at her kitchen table.  Reading through her old cookbook and trying the recipes I can understand why she didn't let us help, between mixing in boiling water and speedily trying to roll out hot dough, there was no room for little fingers to get in the way.
 
Given how inexpensive oatcakes are to buy in stores, there's really not a lot of cost saving in making them, sadly I think they might even be more expensive to make yourself, unless I can find a really cheap source of oatbran.  Also they are more than a bit stressful to make but that might be more to do with the level of experimentation I had to do to get the recipe right, however in the future home made oatcakes are going to be saved for a rare and special treat.  If you come over to my home and I have made them for you, please know that you are a most welcomed and much treasured guest.

Grandma's cookbook had two recipes for oatcakes and for so few ingredients they couldn't be more different.  One uses a whopping 1 & 3/4 pounds of meal along with fat, bicarb and salt, and says to be baked in a quick oven, whatever quick means.  The other uses only 2 & 1/2 handfuls of meal with fat, sugar and salt and instructs that the cakes be 'slipped onto a hot griddle and fired on both sides' (figure that one out) then baked in a moderate oven for an hour.  Careful following of directions produced something inedible from both recipes, so after a bit of playing around I have come up with my own, and tried it a few times now and it works quite well.

A few notes, oatcakes are made from fine milled oatmeal, this is not the flaky oats that you use for porridge, it's grainy little chunks, usually sold now-a-days as oatbran.  It looks like this:

Grandma often used bacon grease as the fat, the recipes both called for lard or dripping (which is rendered beef fat, if you didn't know), and if you use bacon grease don't add salt I found the bacon flavour was salty enough.  In my experiments I tried a couple variations of fat, including bacon grease but also lard, butter and vegetable oil, they all work fine although the animal fats gave browned edges to the cakes where the vegetable oil didn't, and the meaty fats made them a bit more savoury which is not suitable to eating with jam.  If you think making pastry is tricky due the the flour absorbing different amounts of water in different seasons or climates then this is tricky x 1000 but infinitely forgiving, in all my experiments I didn't have a single batch that I had to throw away, unlike pastry which holds a grudge and will send troubadours to perform a song and dance about your failure.

Oatcakes

Preheat the oven to approx 400^F (200^C)

In a bowl measure in and mix together
300grams oatbran
1/2 tsp baking soda (bicarb)
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar

Pour in
4 tsp melted fat of your choice

Then slowly add in boiling water from the kettle.  Add the water a bit at a time and mix with a spoon then add a bit more water and mix, keep going until you start to panic that you could end up making gruel instead of dough, stop adding water but keep mixing until the oatbran starts to swell up and the dough comes together.  You need enough water to swell up the gritty bits of oatbran with enough left over to make the starch that comes out sticky enough to hold together.  If you get carried away and add way too much water, and you actually have gruel, you can add some, but not too much, more oatbran and keep mixing.

Liberally sprinkle your countertop with oatbran (50 - 100 grams depending on how dry or wet your dough is) and tip the dough out onto it, roll it in the oatbran so it doesn't stick to your hands and press into a compact ball then flatten into a disk.  Then quickly roll it out with a rolling pin, it's going to stick to the counter and there's nothing you can do about it, get it down below 1/2 a centimetre thick, it stiffens up fast.  As you're rolling it will feel like you're just pushing/squishing the dough into shape rather than the elastic sensation of rolling that you get with most doughs, it's fine that's what you want.  If you keep getting cracks in your dough and you can't push them to stick back together, you probably didn't add enough water and the grains absorbed it all and dried out the starch too fast, no worries, pick it all up, put it back in your bowl, crumble it up and add more water, mix it up and try again, for being difficult to work with it's a remarkably easygoing dough.

Cut it into squares or rounds or triangles, whatever you wish, and use a pallet knife or flipper or similar tool to scrape the oatcake off the counter, it'll keep its shape (like I said, easygoing), transfer to a cookie sheet, don't worry about them spreading, they won't they might shrink a bit though.  If you have off cut bits or used a cookie cutter to get rounds, you can crumble up the scraps back in the bowl add some more water and repeat the rolling process.

Bake for 10 minutes at 400^F for about 10 minutes but if the edges start to brown quickly cut this time short.  Different fats (and I'm sure different ovens as well) will have different effects so keep an eye on them right now.

Then open the oven, re-arrange the tray(s) by turning them front to back and/or switching shelves so that they don't over-brown.  Turn the heat down to 165^F (75^C) and bake for 1 hour, this is to dry them out and you can walk away until your oven timer goes off.

Eat them warm, with cheese, or deli meats, or butter and jam, or butter and cheese or jam and cheese.  They're nicest with cheese in my opinion, any type of cheese too, smelly cheese, mild cheese, creamy cheese, hard cheese, it's all good.  They'll keep in an air tight container or even a plastic bag for at least a good few days, not sure how long because I'll always eat them all before they have a chance to go stale.